Jong-Fast...examines this 'annus horribilis' with exacting detail, unflinching honesty and raw emotion, managing to leaven the pain with self-deprecating humor and a mighty reservoir of love. Her prose is direct, simple and filled with bits of wisdom, asides to the reader, all of which creates an experience of intimacy with an adored friend ... A midlife coming-of-age story in the extreme. Jong-Fast has put to words the tumult of the worst year of her life, captured and harnessed the experience so that the rest of us can know that we are not alone. She’s Job with a sense of humor.
Jong-Fast has written a memoir that feels like an effort to transcend her mother’s narrative with her own, while still remaining deeply bound to the family form ... Jong-Fast is cognizant of both her nepo-baby privilege and the thorny ethics of writing a memoir about an ailing parent. Yet she remains unsparing in her analysis, and grief and rage coincide with comedy and uptown-literati charm ... Reading How to Lose Your Mother, one senses that the mother got the very daughter she wanted, even if she had no idea what to do with her when she arrived.
Ruthlessly honest and often hilarious ...
The scenes from Jong-Fast’s childhood are described with a waspish humour but are nevertheless terribly sad ... [Jong-Fast] is a strange combination of being incredibly clear-sighted about her mother’s failings and endlessly forgiving of them ... She is a strange combination of being incredibly clear-sighted about her mother’s failings and endlessly forgiving of them.
The writing veers between punchy and meandering, with moments of deep sadness leavened by a sardonic humour. There is a sense, at times, that we are eavesdropping on an extended therapy session ... Her honesty not just about her mother’s shortcomings but her own, specifically her reluctance to spend time with Erica, is affecting ... '[I’ve] always hated the idea of writing a book like this',
she notes more than once, to which the obvious response is: 'Then why do it?' Certainly, Jong-Fast’s assertion that she is a bad daughter for writing about Erica’s decline strikes a disingenuous note ... Jong-Fast is most convincing when describing the blunt reality of her situation.
Gripping ... Emotional ... Readers will relate to the raw vulnerability she expresses in her relationship and will feel both pain and uplift as they make their way through the book.
Frank and conflicted ... This perfect storm of life events will be familiar to many middle-aged women, and navigating these multiple familial crises might have made for a compelling narrative regardless of her mother’s biography. But Erica’s one-time celebrity, and the way it warped her daughter’s childhood, adds an extra layer of prurient fascination; for Jong-Fast, it’s impossible to witness her mother’s decline without being pitched repeatedly into painful memories of neglect and abandonment that she has yet to make peace with, and perhaps never will ... In many ways, How To Lose Your Mother is a bleak book, only partially leavened by Jong-Fast’s conversational tone and sardonic humour ... Jong-Fast writes with the precision-guided self-awareness of someone who has spent decades in therapy and AA; she is clear-eyed about her own co-dependency and enmeshment, and tries to elicit compassion for a woman who inflicted her own damage on the people closest to her .. Molly Jong-Fast is the embodiment of Erica Jong’s legacy, and this book is a brave, if sometimes troubling, testament to her own capacity for survival.
Her honesty, her self-awareness, and her grief keep you on her side, as well as her humor, understated, blunt, and sometimes black ... The best book Jong-Fast could have written about the worst year of her life.
Staggering ... Resisting tidy sentiment or easy answers, Jong-Fast dives headfirst into the often-difficult ambiguities of parent-child bonds. The results are stunning.
